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How To Optimize Page Load Time - 20 Tips for Website Owners

Websites are a great tool for business promotion and generating awareness about the products and services provided by you. People, who visit the site, can turn out to be prospect buyers as they visit your page after a search engine shows your name. Unless you are a large renowned organization that is known across people you bank on organic search results from the search engine.

While going for search engine optimization the website the time, a page takes to load counts. A portal, that takes time to load, may fall in page ranking as popular search engines consider it among the two hundred factors that decide the page rank in a search.

Apart from a high ranking page, a slow loading process may tempt prospect clients to exit in a matter of seconds and go to the next site that can be of your competitor. After all, with technology being available at ease; every enterprise is going to their site and the competition for visibility is high in this sphere.

When developing a site for your organization keep in mind the necessity of a fast loading of the page. In case you are wondering, how to reduce page load timethen these suggestions can come in a helpful for a fast speed:

Keep It Simple: While the graphics look attractive, they can consume huge space as they come in an image format. The words thus serve no search engine optimization purpose and negatively affect the ranking by taking a longer time to load. Go for cascading style sets and stick to text format. It will help you with search engines by reducing the size of the page. The conception that graphic text attracts more people is flawed. The people visiting your site will like the texts to be more readable, so keep it simple and informative.

Images On The Page: While illustrations and images make a page attractive and easy to comprehend they can take up a lot of space. A page that is burdened with heavy image files can take minutes to load. In case, you are thinking about downsizing it using HTML editor then it does not help. The picture may change in appearance but eats up the same space. Go for external tools that can compress the size. A few examples are online image optimizer, JPEG and PNG Stripper and many more.

Selecting the file type: The file format of the image can reduce the size and enhance speed. Using formats like JPG, PNG and GIF can help to induce pictures that go easy on the website.

External files for storage: While you create a portal keep the JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets stored in external files. It reduces the overall size and allows fast uploading of the website. Apart from this benefit an external storage provides the ease of maintenance in case of site downtime. While the browser loads, the website the files are cached from external sources and thereby using the time taken.

For Better Management: Caching can be used to reduce the time taken to bring the website completely in front of the eyes of the users. When you load a website, the images, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets, download with it. Every time you open the website they start downloading from the scratch and take up a lot of time. Creating an HTTP cache allows these external files to be saved in the browser or proxy. The next time you visit the site these files are retrieved from the cached files and thus are faster than the previous process. Apart from this benefit going for an optimized caching system can reduce the cost of hosting and bandwidth of the website.

Reduce The Clutter: Plugins are necessary for any portal. Social networking plugins ensure that your content is shared easily across various dimensions, but they take up a lot of space and make the website slow. Judge well the plugins that you want to include and remove the unnecessary clutter. Go for content management system built-in plugins for better speed. It will provide easy maintenance and enhanced speed.

Checking The Links: Redirects can hinder the speed of loading a page. Avoid them unless they are absolutely necessary. Though some of the redirects are necessary for better link creation it, is not a prudent decision to go overboard with them. Broken links hinder the speed and result in a low ranking website. They are the ones that lead you nowhere when they are clicked, and this acts as a prompt to the search engine to rank your page low. Check them and get rid of them as soon as possible.

Arranging The Files: JavaScript can take up a lot of space to load so keeping them in the end will help other features to get downloaded fast. The visitor can access the other information while these scripts load in the system.

Check The Codes: Perform an audit while creating and website and remove the HTML and CSS that are not required. It overburdens the site with unnecessary codes. In the event, you are going for a Content Management System for website creation then it comes with a built-in Cascading style sheets or CSS and themes for designing. It allows you not to add any additional codes for this purpose.

Staying Abreast: In case you are using Content Management System or CMS software, regularly check for the updates of the software. They come with tools that can enhance your website but do not make these updates live on your website without testing. See how it works on another server and update it if you find an enhanced user experience.

Reduce The Size: Cookies are used to transfer the data between two servers and browsers, and a reduced size means low time taken in completing the process. Get rid of the cookies that you do not require and go for an expiry date that is sooner than the previous one. For enhanced results, go for no expiry dates.

Do Not Overuse: Keeping a track of the number of page views is essential to gauge the site's popularity but going over the top with analysis may affect the speed of the portal. While you are going for a tracking tool go for one instead of two or more. E-commerce sites, for example, have a built-in tracker and introducing a separate analytics tool will not render it invalid. In this event going for the default tracking device is a prudent decision.

Zip The Content: Compress the files and content of your website using G-Zip Compressions. It is quite similar to the compression that is carried out to compress and store files in your computer.

Remove Unused Codes: Reduce the size of your JavaScript and CSS by minification. It is a process where unused codes are removed by various tools and thus reducing the subsequent loading time.

Combining Images: Reduce the image requests with the help of tools like CSS Sprites. Combine all the background images into one using background-image and background-position tools so that the total size decreases. Remove duplicate scripts by identifying them as HTTP request are multiplied in the event of duplicate scripts. Culminate the inline images in cached systems for high speed.

Right Placements: As is the practice, place style sheets on the top. It has all the information regarding what the visitors will like to see so it will engage people and improve the speed factor. Put the logo, menu bar in these criteria to get a well-laid portal that gets organic visitors.

Using Headers: For the static elements in your site, use Expire Headers. They will define that for how long the item will be cached in the browser or server. Cache-Control headers are for dynamic components like images, stylesheets, Flash and scripts. It reduces the time of downloads, and these two elements will introduce a smooth process.

Go for a Singular Hosting: When you use multiple hosts for your website the time taken for a Domain Name System to lookup for the relevant names increase. It is because there are many parallel downloads going on as DNS resolver returns the IP address for each of the host and thus increasing the total loading time. It will be advisable to use one unique host name for a site.

Using Different Request Methods: Using a GET request speeds up the process as it takes one TCP packet to send data. The process is shorter than POST that sends the header first and then sends the data.

Include What is Needed: Avoid using nested tables for layouts, use font.css, reset.css and grids.cc to increase the accessibility of Document Object Model in JavaScript. Make the markups less crowded.

With these Tips to Optimize Page Load Time, you can look forward to enhanced speed and better search results. These small tricks ensure that you stand out of the crowd by using speed. They are necessary to get better Search Engine Optimization and rank high in search engines. They are easy to follow and slight modifications can make it possible.